A How to Guide: Realestalking
Urban Living was quoted in the Seattle Times today, Realestalking: When the home of your dreams becomes your obsession:
Realestalkers work in various ways. Matt Goyer, editor of local condo blog Urban Living.com, uses the Internet to keep tabs on certain properties.
“There are people who are stalking condos online by reading blogs,” he said. “It’s a little harder to do that for houses because nobody’s writing about houses. If I had more time in the day, I would do that.”
Goyer, who works for Redfin.com, is tracking a unit at 1310 E. Union on Capitol Hill. He uses his company’s free listing alerts — a daily e-mail with addresses that have just gone on the market — to keep up on what’s available.
Here are my tips:
- Email alerts: Stay on top of new condos with Redfin’s nightly email alerts
- County records: Use King County’s property report to look up who owns a place
- Google: Use Google to look up the owner. You can also try LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
- Blockshopper: Blockshopper is also a voyeuristic way of watching what’s going on in the market
- Make Me Move: Have they advertised the place on Zillow using the make me move or for-sale-by-owner features?
- Craigslist: Have they advertised it for rent or sale on Craigslist?
- Snail mail: Many years ago I snail mailed everyone in a townhouse development trying to find someone who would sell after I lost out on the place I wanted. Turns out nobody did and I bought a house instead.
Though I think the real expert here is EconE… Care to share your tricks EconE?
